One Man's Opinion

There's always a sense of impending catastrophe when Willard Romney gets someone to pen an op-ed for his signature. The last time around, he slapped his name on a column about arms control that demonstrated quite conclusively that neither he not his ghostwriter knew enough about the subject to feed to a fish. Today, The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now d/b/a an unprofitable subsidiary of the educational-testing industry, gave him a few column inches in which to find new ways of calling the president a wimp.

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"Feckless" is apparently today's entry in Willard's Word-A-Day desk calendar. This piece begins, as all such things must, with a gross historical lie....

Beginning Nov. 4, 1979 , dozens of U.S. diplomats were held hostage by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries for 444 days while America's feckless president, Jimmy Carter, fretted in the White House. Running for the presidency against Carter the next year, Ronald Reagan made it crystal clear that the Iranians would pay a very stiff price for continuing their criminal behavior. On Jan. 20, 1981, in the hour that Reagan was sworn into office, Iran released the hostages. The Iranians well understood that Reagan was serious about turning words into action in a way that Jimmy Carter never was.

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No. Even if you don't believe in the "October Surprise" theory, by which the Reagan campaign got the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the 1980 elections, the historical record is clear that the Iranians delayed the release of the hostages in January as a final fck-you to Carter, who had frozen their U.S. assets. They released the hostages because bold, serious manly-man Reagan gave them their money back. Bold, serious, manly-man Reagan later turned his words into action by selling missiles to the mullahs. In fact, the one genuinely stupid thing Carter did during the whole affair was the rescue attempt that went so badly wrong. Apparently, that would have been the first club out of the bag for rough, tough Mitt Romney who, thus far, hasn't been able to muster up the balls to stand for anything for longer than 15 minutes at a time. We continue.

The same Islamic fanatics who took our diplomats hostage are racing to build a nuclear bomb. Barack Obama, America's most feckless president since Carter, has declared such an outcome unacceptable, but his rhetoric has not been matched by an effective policy. While Obama frets in the White House, the Iranians are making rapid progress toward obtaining the most destructive weapons in the history of the world.

He has very little proof of the latter assertion, and he can take the whole "feckless" thing up with Osama bin Laden and some Somali pirates. Of course, Mitt once vetoed an increase in the minimum wage in Massachusetts, so he knows all about hard choices.

The overall rubric of my foreign policy will be the same as Ronald Reagan's: namely, "peace through strength." Like Reagan, I have put forward a comprehensive plan to rebuild American might and equip our soldiers with the weapons they need to prevail in any conflict. By increasing our annual naval shipbuilding rate from nine to 15, I intend to restore our position so that our Navy is an unchallengeable power on the high seas. Just as Reagan sought to defend the United States from Soviet weapons with his Strategic Defense Initiative, I will press forward with ballistic missile defense systems to ensure that Iranian and North Korean missiles cannot threaten us or our allies.

Because nothing says "peace through strength" like throwing more money down the rathole of a missile defense system that never will work, and building a whole lot more giant ships in a world where practically none of our most immediate adversaries has a navy worthy of the name. And, of course, he will balance the budget because... SALT LAKE OLYMPICS!

The rest of the piece is AIPAC trolling and campaign bluster that is completely unworthy of a serious candidate for president. The Iran issue is the toughest nut on the plate right now. The president is trying to thread a needle with a rapidly narrowing eye, but he and Benjamin Netanyahu both agree that ignorantly belligerent rhetoric in both their countries is doing little to make the problem any easier. If you want a serious consideration of what a nuclear Iran might mean — and it's always helpful to remember that we do not yet have a nuclear Iran, and may still be years from having one at all — you should read Paul Pillar's piece. That not-having-a-war-with-Iran is considered out of the box thinking these days is a good measure of how mindless drum-banging has deformed the country's thinking. That Mitt Romney is willing to be ignorant in print on this same issue is an even more precise metric.